Kenan Malik wrote this in an opinion column in The Guardian today:
The paradox is that the public in Britain is more liberal today about immigration than are most politicians. Yet the timidity of the Labour party in challenging reactionary claims, or in articulating an alternative vision, has allowed the right to frame the debate and to pursue unconscionable policies. The far right does not need to be in power for its ideas to percolate more widely, even within societies that think of themselves as “liberal”.
I think he is right.
As data I noted from the FT yesterday also shows, this is just a true on climate related issues, where people are also much more inclined to favour action than politicians from the right or supposed left are willing to suggest in their policy proposals.
So, why is it that Labour is so reluctant to reflect this inclination amongst the population at large in their policy agenda?
Is it that they spent too much time watching Top Gear over the years and now live in fear of that culture?
Could it be that they have a deep-seated insecurity when it comes to standing up to the interests of big business when the latter so clearly want what the country does not?
Or is that they simply do not do ideology-based politics and so go where the money is, with money filling the vacuum where their convictions should be?
I fear it's all three.
No wonder we are in trouble.
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A major reason is the power of newspapers -80% of whom are not only Conservative but Reactionary. Fewer and fewer newspapers are sold but they still have an influence.
They tend to set the agenda for the TV coverage, so we obsess about a former politician’s bank account; a TV presenter’s private life, squabbles in the Royal family and ‘woke’.
People queueing to pay for an item see the papers displayed and the headlines and I think a number take in the message subliminally -immigrants , the ‘fury at’ headlines and scare stories-tax, crime and “left wing extremists’.
As you have pointed out we lack journalists and politicians who have the courage to challenge. The commentators exist in alternative media and blogs but their arguments don’t get wide coverage. You have done well to get the coverage you have but if the sort of views you put forward were seriously debated in main stream media, things would -probably-start to change.
I am sure this is not just because of the opinions of individual journalists. I also think that if many did have more progressive views they would not be there but the direction is set elsewhere by strong vested interests beyond the owners of the papers.
The press is their tool.
I have quoted this one before but it still holds true almost a century later
Three days before the election, on March 17, 1931, Baldwin counterattacked in a public address he gave to voters in St. George’s.
“The newspapers attacking me are not newspapers in the ordinary sense,” Baldwin said. “They are engines of propaganda for the constantly changing policies, desires, personal vices, personal likes and dislikes of the two men. What are their methods? Their methods are direct falsehoods, misrepresentation, half-truths, the alteration of the speaker’s meaning by publishing a sentence apart from the context…What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.”
You have perfectly captured what my addled brain could not get across.
The Guardian has come up trumps again with this piece by Phillip Inman, celebrating that the BofE is being proved right. I despair.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jul/30/mortgage-rates-ease-as-bank-of-englands-bitter-medicine-shows-signs-of-working
I am beginning to see your light and I can sense your disappointment with Starmer’s Labour Party regarding an understanding of radical economics.
Not sure that many UK voters know what they want though, other than undefined change.
Tactically, Labour do not appear to be letting the Conservatives have much political territory can call their own and then exploit a policy division, something the Conservatives expert. All very short term and dispiriting to those with a progressive standpoint.
More dispiriting still, not one party looks positioned to deliver what the marginalised and the poor need at the next General Election. An open door of popularism.
And who is speaking to most younger voters?
Maybe the Greens….
“So, why is it that Labour is so reluctant to reflect this inclination amongst the population at large in their policy agenda?”
Labour consistently failing to recognise the UK state has a money creation monopoly in the first instance (same under Corbyn, same also true with all the other UK parties, Thatcherism on steroids)!
See section entitled “Exogenous Pricing: A Basic Case of Monopoly” in the following essay:-
https://moslereconomics.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Full-Employment-AND-Price-Stability.pdf
Generating and capturing outrage has become one of the primary tools. A minority of interests have managed, via outlets such as the Daily Mail and the Jeremy Vine show, to stoke up and then capture outrage, jelousy and fury which it then amplifies and releases as the voice of the people.
How else can we account for people supporting and voting for policies that have a negative impact on them.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2022/oct/31/the-town-where-brexit-died-but-hope-survives-video
This video by John Harris illuminates this, the example here of the fishing industry, starting roughly at 6.21.
‘Well, we got led down the path again didn’t we?’
Interestingly that particular gentleman’s solution appears to be voting for no one.
Overall the entire strategy, or prevailing views, seem to be about being against something rather than being for something else.
John Harris very good at this sort of thing.
I agree with the post and much of the comment here but this issue takes some unpicking.
My mantra is that you cannot assign blame to a populace that is as manipulated as this one – a populace that we too inhabit.
Even now, I’m still seeing adds for cars on TV – SUVs more often – depicting clear roads, not traffic jams, selling personal freedom in the form vehicular mobility and other ‘stuff’. They’re still selling holidays in the sun – a sun which is increasingly killing people and damaging things. You couldn’t make it up.
I think the phrase ‘retail therapy’ is often under-thought about and links with what you say in your last line Richard (money replacing convictions).
Self-medicating for feeling down, worried about life or the challenges we face, self-medication is to buy something new to make us feel better or equal to our surroundings. The markets sell dreams, and we – to create some sort of hope – buy those dreams to keep us going. Money is being used to buy dreams which help us to cope with the insecurity – because even dreams are a surrogate form of progress to many – a progress away from reality.
As for ideology – leave that to the politicians.
My view is that what people do not get anymore from politics is a big plan – being led a way out of or to something. Except that the big con is that they ARE getting a big plan called ‘rolling back the state’.
Thatcher’s way still rules – state retrenchment is still the order of the day. That’s the only big plan it seems. Which means that society as we know it is being disassembled, resulting in chaos.
Look at policy making now. It is so short term, and reactive and after many years of observation, policy (in addition to the key perma-policy of rolling back the state) is just where neo-liberalism has shot itself in the foot, things have got out of hand, the complexities were not thought through and now a budget has to be allocated to smooth things over and deal with the chaos to keep retrenchment on track.
So, these little episodes of ‘self-medication’ by the government just confuse people – there’s cognitive dissonance – how can they be rolling things back when they’re spending money the people ask – right? But even though the Tories are spending money, why am I still so worried, so insecure, why can I not get adult social care for my elderly mother, why is my mortgage now so expensive, why are my kids saddled with debt on minimum wage? I’m confused. I’m depressed? Off to the shops I go where the market will give me the soma I need.
But people fail to make the causal connection therefore between the long term aim of rolling back the state and these little policy prop-ups because it is a very cunning and sneaky way to run things down.
The government – in its rush to dismantle – has to also self-medicate and make retail-therapy policy and print money to temporarily prop up its long term state retrenchment programme up!!!
Examples? Well think of Thatcher’s Estate Regeneration Budget (ERB) policies led by Tory whet Michael Heseltine – used to cover up her addiction to monetarism and aversion to rent and other property market controls. Toxteth, Bristol and Brixton all made her think again.
More recently, we have Gove’s Department of Levelling Up, Housing & Communities launching projects to deal with homelessness like NSAP, RSAP and now called SHAP (look them up – I’ve been involved at a local level with all of them intimately!). Homelessness has many causes that can be traced back to poor national government policy itself from health provision, management of the economy, the courts, tenant and landlord law, family law, housing market regulation, drug law – all of which will have had ideologically damaging fingerprints on them.
All these polices are just the Tories self-medicating, treating the negative outcomes of their own major shitty national policies elsewhere that still exist!
And in the middle of that you have normal people in the chaos and confusion of the continuous short-termism being caused by a long term trajectory of rolling back the state.
It’s totally FUBAR.
Which is why – as you so often point out – we desperately need real change – not a craven, already beaten Labour party.
Agreed, including on FUBAR
Today’s Radio 4 had Mandelson yet again – talking about about Labour’s ‘far left’. The interviewer mildly asked that many in Labour wanted Starmer to offer more of a vision – but yet again just accepted Mandelson’s perspective that it was all about some extremists.
Notably the interviewer didnt challenge the perspective – in that the majority of the general population want public ownership of utilities and taxing the rich , banks etc.
This is still the ‘balance of opinion’ remit the BBC gives itself rather than a search for objective truth.
My daughter is 25 – categorically will not vote Labour due to various of starmer’s policy announcements over the last 2 years- and that dreadful attack advert on sunak. I think a lot of people of all ages will vote green with their consciences.
We lack journalists and politicians who are willing to challenge the agenda
Are you ‘YES’, yet?
???
I read recently that in the USA, until a few years ago, a young black man was more likely to go to prison than to university. In the same way, an ordinary member of the Labour party is far more likely to be suspended than to have any influence on Labour policy